The man I loved didn’t fit the stereotype of an incel. He wasn’t some bitter, jobless guy raging on Reddit from his parents’ spare room. He was smart, sociable, gainfully employed — neat suit, good salary, praised by his boss. On paper, he looked like the kind of man any woman might be proud to date. But behind his polite smile was a festering resentment.

Even though he’d had relationships, he was still an incel — because his resentment never left. He wasn’t unwanted; he was just angry that the women he wanted didn’t want him back. As a younger man, he’d struggled on the dating market, only finding confidence once he had money and status. Every rejection hardened into a belief that women were shallow or “corrupted by feminism.” To him, dating wasn’t mutual — it was a hierarchy he thought he deserved to win. When things didn’t go his way, he blamed women collectively. That’s the real incel mindset: not celibacy, but entitlement.

I grew up in London — Asian, neurodiverse, the daughter of two academics. He was my opposite: white, working-class, raised in a northern village where almost everyone looked the same. His dad was a policeman, his mum a dental nurse. Their home was full of Union Jacks, their politics firmly pro-Brexit, their social feeds littered with far-right talking points and sympathy for Tommy Robinson. That was his normal.

To most people, he was the picture of “lad culture”: football, pubs, cheap flights, cage-fighting clips with his mates. But beneath the laughter was anger. He admired Trump, Farage, and Andrew Tate. He distrusted refugees. He mocked diversity initiatives. He once told me he wanted to study history through the Open University — then spent hours talking about the Third Reich as if it were a masterclass in order, not a warning of horror. His intelligence made his obsession feel deliberate, and chilling.

At work, though, he played a different role. He was confident, helpful, always volunteering to “rescue” me. His boss adored him. His colleagues saw him as dependable. And I, exhausted from masking my autism in a corporate world built for neurotypicals, let him. Gratitude became my survival tool — thank you for the help, thank you for the advice — while he quietly took control. It wasn’t kindness; it was power dressed as protection.

He’d tried similar tactics with other women in the team, but they brushed him off. I didn’t. I was the only non-white person in my cohort, already under scrutiny, and his “help” gave me breathing room. What looked like support became dependence — and dependence became control.

Outside work, he was worse. His friends were openly anti-immigrant, casually sharing memes about “remigration.” His family mirrored those views: Brexit flags, jokes about “wokeness,” complaints that Britain had “gone soft.” He wasn’t an outlier; he was part of an ecosystem where grievance passed as common sense.

That contradiction never stopped haunting me. Here was a man with every social advantage — white, male, employed, respected — and yet he saw himself as a victim. He’d built a story where he was the one betrayed by progress, by feminism, by diversity. His father’s temper, his parents’ messy split during COVID — all of it fed his sense of grievance and decline.

My feelings changed in stages: first confusion, then fear, then pity. Pity that his intelligence had been wasted on resentment. Pity that his masculinity had shrunk into dominance. Pity that he couldn’t imagine a Britain where he wasn’t on top. But pity doesn’t neutralise danger. His politics bled into everything — how he treated women, how he talked about race, how he saw the world.